Like most accounting firm owners, you probably started your firm because you wanted to build a better life for yourself.
Maybe that meant higher profits, more control over your career, or an improved accounting work-life balance.
But that’s not what happened at all.
You’re falling very short of the margins you wanted. And worse, you’re working even longer hours than before.
That’s why I’ll share work-life balance strategies that actually make a difference for firm owners like you.
Let’s go!
Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Xero. Everything discussed is my honest opinion based on personal experience.
Table of Contents
- Why Do Accountants Struggle with Accounting Work-Life Balance?
- 11 Tactics to Improve Your Accounting Work-Life Balance
- 1) Engage in Capacity Planning
- 2) Hire the Right People Early
- 3) Use 3-Tiered Pricing to Control Capacity
- 4) Only Offer Services You Love Doing
- 5) Delegate the Tasks You Don’t Enjoy
- 6) Be Picky With Your Clients
- 7) Reverse Engineer Your Ideal Life and Stick to an Action Plan
- 8) Learn to Say “No”
- 9) Live by the 80/20 Rule
- 10) Get Support from a Community / Mentor / Coach
- 11) Engage in a Regular Hobby
Why Do Accountants Struggle with Accounting Work-Life Balance?
Everyone has a different definition of work-life balance.
Some would define it as not working more than 40 hours a week.
And then there are others who define it as clocking out of work the same time every day.
Here’s my definition:
Work-life balance is about being able to spend the amount of time you want on the things you want.
This is unfortunately far from the case for most accountants for a few reasons:
- Poor capacity planning: Without a clear understanding of how much work your team can handle, it’s easy to overcommit and stretch resources thin. This leads to long hours and missed deadlines and creates a vicious cycle of stress and burnout that’s incredibly hard to escape.
- Too many clients: Taking on too many clients (especially low-paying and high-maintenance ones) leads to you spreading yourself thin and sacrificing quality for quantity. This not only destroys your work-life balance but also hurts your firm’s overall profitability.
- Badly priced service packages: Underpricing your services forces you to work significantly more hours just to make up for the revenue shortfall, leaving virtually no time for personal priorities.
- Not knowing how to delegate: Many firm owners are perfectionists who think they’re the only ones who can do things right. They keep everything on their plate and work 50+ hours per week despite having a skilled team who can handle the work.
A study by Xero also supports these.
They found that 42% of public accounting professionals said that the biggest barrier to their well-being is lack of time:
That same study also found that half of public accounting professionals practice daily habits to protect their well-being.
This is what I learned after years of trial and error…
Work-life balance isn’t something that just happens.
It’s the result of making deliberate choices about how you structure your business.
More importantly, it’s something that you need to protect at all times.
11 Tactics to Improve Your Accounting Work-Life Balance
If you’re tired of working excessive hours or weekends, the strategies below are for you.
These aren’t quick fixes — they address foundational issues in your firm so you can eliminate overwork and enjoy the firm you started.
1) Engage in Capacity Planning
Let’s kick off this list with a big one…
Like I shared on LinkedIn, most accounting firm owners struggle to achieve work-life balance because they don’t perform any capacity planning.
In all the years I ran my firm, I never worked crazy hours in any given week nor did I ever have to work weekends.
I thank capacity planning for that.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool in eliminating overwork not only for yourself but also your team.
This is a huge benefit, because when team members have a good work-life balance, their job satisfaction increases.
And while I’m not a big fan of using timesheets (i.e., recording time and looking backward), I’m an advocate of forecasting time forward to foresee and avoid any potential capacity crunches.
How?
- Assign a time forecast to each task
- Enter each person’s weekly capacity (e.g., 30 working hours per week, etc.)
- Generate a report to compare forecasted time requirements to available capacity
You can access reports like these through an app with workload planning like Teamwork (affiliate link), which lets you view firm-wide reports as well:
2) Hire the Right People Early
Why are firm owners so busy with all kinds of client work?
Because they wait until they’re completely overwhelmed before hiring anyone.
They’ll hire someone when they’re already loaded up to 110%…
And once they hire someone, maybe their capacity will drop to 75%.
And then they’ll start accepting more and more clients and load themselves back up to 110%, repeating the cycle.
This reactive hiring approach is especially brutal during the busy season when you’re already stretched thin.
The solution? Hire before you think you need to.
I know it feels scary to bring on overhead when you’re not yet at capacity.
But as a firm owner, your job isn’t to be the person doing the work — it’s to be the person building the business.
You should be spending zero percent of your time on client deliverables and minimal time dealing with clients directly.
When you hire proactively, you create breathing room to focus on what actually moves the needle: strategy, business development, and building systems that prevent you from becoming the bottleneck again.
3) Use 3-Tiered Pricing to Control Capacity
Most accountants price their services reactively: they hear what a client wants and then struggle to put together a custom quote.
This approach hands all the control to the client and leaves you constantly scrambling to deliver.
Three-tiered pricing completely changes this dynamic.
Let’s say a high-caliber prospect approaches you, but they want everything…
1-hour response times, daily bookkeeping, weekly check-ins, and all the bells and whistles.
You might have said yes to everything and then worked nights and weekends to deliver.
But with tiered pricing, you put all those capacity-draining services in your Gold tier — and price it accordingly high like below:
In the example, you’ll see the things that would really drain your firm’s capacity in the Gold plan, like daily bookkeeping and a 1-hour response time.
You’ll also see that option priced very high compared to the other plans.
Here’s what happens: You present all three options, knowing full well that most clients will gravitate toward the Silver plan, which looks reasonable by comparison.
This automatically filters out the most demanding requests while still giving high-maintenance clients the option to pay premium prices for premium service.
The beauty is that you’re not saying no to revenue — you’re just making sure that if someone wants to consume a lot of your time, they’re paying enough to make it worth your while.
That premium pricing also funds the additional team members you’ll need to deliver that level of service without burning yourself out.
4) Only Offer Services You Love Doing
It’s your business. Focus on that fact.
You’re in complete control. So why spend time in areas that you absolutely despise?
For instance, if you hate audit services, then why offer them in your accounting firm?
Part of ensuring a better work-life balance in your accounting firm is making sure that you’re spending time in the areas that you love and that you’re passionate about.
If you’re only offering specific accounting services because you feel like you have to, you’ll make yourself miserable.
For example, I’m not good with taxes, and I don’t enjoy tax work.
That’s why I shared on LinkedIn that if I were starting over with an accounting firm, I wouldn’t offer it.
Too many accounting firm owners get caught up in just making money that they forget that there’s more to life than that.
If you want a good work-life balance, cut out the stuff you hate doing and just focus on what you love.
5) Delegate the Tasks You Don’t Enjoy
Even after you’ve eliminated services you hate, there’s still going to be work that needs to get done that you’d rather not do yourself.
These are:
- Administrative tasks like scheduling appointments and managing your calendar.
- Operational work like building processes and implementing technology.
- Client work that generates revenue but bores you — like data entry or basic bookkeeping cleanup.
The mistake most firm owners make is thinking they need to personally handle everything because “no one else will do it right” or “it’s faster if I just do it myself.”
This might be true in the short term, but it’s a recipe for burnout in the long run.
To help you identify the tasks you should delegate, I created a task delegation planner that you can download.
Your time should be spent on activities that either generate significant revenue or move your business forward strategically.
Everything else should be systematized and delegated to capable team members.
Yes, it takes time upfront to train someone and create processes.
But think about it this way: would you rather spend 10 hours training someone to handle your admin work, or spend 2 hours every week for the rest of your career doing it yourself?
Get comfortable with the idea that “good enough” from someone else is better than “perfect” from you, especially when that perfection is keeping you chained to your desk.
6) Be Picky With Your Clients
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: not all revenue is good revenue.
That client who pays late, demands immediate responses, and questions every invoice?
They’re costing you money and your sanity.
You want clients who are both profitable and pleasant to work with. Clients who:
- Respect your expertise
- Pay on time
- Don’t treat you like their personal assistant
The hard part is letting go of existing clients who fall short of these standards.
I know it feels scary to walk away from revenue, but firing one difficult client often creates space and energy for two great ones.
Be selective. Your peace of mind is worth more than any single client’s fees.
7) Reverse Engineer Your Ideal Life and Stick to an Action Plan
Many firm owners are stuck on the hamster wheel.
Partly because they’re trapped in the cycle of wanting to make more and more money.
And partly because they don’t really know where they want to specifically go.
This was certainly true for me as well.
I just wanted to grow my firm as big as possible, because I thought that’s what a business needs to do.
And I ignored the ultimate end goal of what I was working towards (because I never defined it).
This meant I was working more hours than I wanted to.
I was dealing with stress and anxiety from being faced with a myriad of opportunities that I didn’t know how to prioritize since there was no plan in place.
Ultimately, I wasn’t getting the work-life balance that I wanted, and the stress affected even my personal life.
This was especially true around the time when I was getting offers to buy my firm.
I was very confused and it was negatively affecting me. I lost my focus.
And then I had a breakthrough:
I’ll start at where I want to ideally end up and then reverse engineer what I need to do to get there.
And to do that, I very simply just filled in these blanks:
This helped me get clarity on how much I need to be happy in life and where I wanted to be spending my time.
It helped me paint my ideal life and determine my main focus.
With these items all crystal clear, I just needed to work backward to arrive at what I need to be doing now to be on track for my ideal life.
That allowed my decisions to be consistent with where I wanted to end up.
With my ultimate desired destination clear, this allowed me to reverse engineer the steps I need to be taking right now to be on the path towards my ideal life.
I carry forward this concept in business as well, where I set up a strategic plan to arrive at my desired destination, consistent with my personal goals.
I then reverse engineer my goals for the next 90 days to stay on track.
I call this a Roadmap in my Future Firm Accelerate program.
It’s one of the lessons in the playbook where you’ll learn a step-by-step process to building a firm that gives you the profits and the work-life balance you’ve always wanted.
8) Learn to Say “No”
The fastest way to reclaim hours in your week? Start saying no to things that don’t matter.
You’re probably bombarded with requests for “just 5 minutes” here and “a quick 15-minute call” there.
Vendor pitches, networking events that go nowhere, clients asking for free advice, colleagues wanting to “pick your brain.”
Meetings are also a huge culprit here.
That’s why I shared on LinkedIn how to decide whether to say “yes” or “no” to meeting requests.
Here’s the solution:
Get crystal clear on your priorities for the next 90 days. What are the 3-5 most important things that will actually move your business forward?
Any request for your time that doesn’t directly advance those priorities gets a polite but firm no.
“Thanks for thinking of me, but I’m not able to take this on right now.”
All those saved 15-minute conversations add up to hours. Those hours add up to entire days.
And those days are where your work-life balance lives.
8) Live by the 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities.
Think about it. How much time do you spend…
- Perfecting proposals that clients never read past the first page?
- Attending industry events where you make zero meaningful connections?
- Tweaking your website for the hundredth time instead of calling prospects?
- Organizing files that are already organized enough?
This also includes things like constantly checking emails and sitting in meetings that could have been a quick message.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a lot of what fills your day is just busy work disguised as business development.
Ask yourself which activities directly led to new clients, increased revenue, or improved operations. Those are your 20% activities.
Everything else? That’s the 80% you need to eliminate, delegate, or dramatically reduce.
When you focus only on the activities that genuinely move your business forward, you’ll be amazed how much time opens up for the things that matter in and out of work.
9) Get Support from a Community / Mentor / Coach
Here’s something I wish I’d learned earlier: you don’t have to figure this out alone.
When you’re stuck in the cycle of overwork, it’s easy to think you’re the only one struggling.
But most firm owners go through the exact same challenges — they’re just not talking about it openly.
Connecting with other firm owners who’ve successfully built businesses that don’t consume their lives can have a big impact.
Why?
They’ve already made the mistakes you’re making and can spot your blind spots in ways you never could.
This could be joining a mastermind group, finding a mentor who’s built what you want to build, or regularly connecting with peers who are a few steps ahead of you.
When you’re surrounded by people who’ve successfully created the work-life balance you want, it stops feeling impossible.
10) Engage in a Regular Hobby
Remember what happened to Jack Nicholson in the movie The Shining?
The famous quote goes:
“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.”
We need time away from work and time away from the computer…
And more time for something else that stimulates our minds.
This also leads to a healthier work-life balance.
My personal hobby is CrossFit. One of the reasons I like it so much is because it takes my mind off of work.
I try to be active with it 4-5 times per week. It’s therapeutic.
I firmly believe that aside from vacations, engaging in some kind of hobby regularly is one of the keys to keeping your mind out of work.
Take Control of Your Work-Life Balance
That’s a wrap!
Use these tactics to break free from the overwork cycle and build a firm that supports your life instead of consuming it.
You don’t need to implement all of them at once.
Pick the one that addresses your biggest pain point right now — whether that’s letting go of clients or finally hiring that team member you’ve been putting off.
The key is taking action now — not someday when things slow down (spoiler alert: they never will).
Which tactic will you start with? What’s your biggest work-life balance challenge right now?
Let me know in the comments below!
I love seeing your Gold/Silver/Bronze breakdowns. This is super helpful. Thanks for the article. Well done!
Glad you liked it Mary 🙂
Where can you find the Xero study that you talked about?
I’ve had to turn down clients since I did not have enough capacity. Hiring early is key for us. Excellent article Ryan. Best wishes.
Where can you find the Xero study that you talked about?
Here you go! https://www.xero.com/blog/2020/05/enabling-wellbeing-for-canadian-accounting-professionals-during-mental-health-week/